Belcher declares that the rise of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump “was a predictable backlash from America electing its first Black president. The panicked response of the waning white majority to what they perceive as the catastrophe of a Black president can be heard in every cry to take back our country. This panic has resulted in the elevation of an overt and unapologetic racist as the nominee of one of America’s major political parties.”

Belcher joined Roland Martin on Thursday’s edition of NewsOne Now to discuss his new book and his stunning new research.

Belcher told Martin after the election of the nation’s first Black president, there was this ideal that America had “reached a major racial milestone.”

According to the author, there was a short rally behind that ideal, but then “what you saw was a spike in racial aversion and antagonism in the data where you did have a backlash and it was a predictable backlash to the first time the vast majority of Whites, their political will did not have an outcome that it wanted.”

Belcher continued, “This is part and parcel to the changes that you’re seeing in America – not as a Democrat or Republican, but this is a struggle that we’re going to have to deal with.”

Quoting W. E. B. Du Bois, Belcher said, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line,” adding, “That continues to be true today and we are confronted with it today in a way that we haven’t been confronted with it in the past because quite frankly, we do have Black and Brown power politically in a way that we’ve never seen it before.”